YouSaid · the spoken record

Rahul Vohra

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-03-23
most recent: 2025-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's actually not true of all startups, and it certainly isn't true of something like superhuman. Yes, working harder is always better, and we work tremendously hard at superhuman, but not to the point where it made sense to release something that didn't work. I'm reminded of a story of a founder. Was in Y combinator told me about their demo day experience. And they used mailbox, which some folks may remember was also a startup and Dropbox famously acquired them for about $100 million. And the reason that they were well known, apart from the acquisition, is they were the first to popularize Swipe to archive or swipe to Markdown, which of course is now standard in superhuman and every other app.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much to spend time ahead of launch really does depend on the markets and the structure, the nature of your business model. For example, let's say you're building a marketplace in a greenfield opportunity. So imagine the lyft or Uber in their heyday. There's a strong network effect because the more cars you have on your platform, the shorter waiting times are, therefore, people are going to preferentially use your app versus the other person's app. That's when there's no time to spare. That's when you probably shouldn't even be sleeping. You're going to hire the most aggressive, maniacal people possible. You're going to work 120 hour weeks because every marginal minute actually does matter. Every marginal minute in the market. Growing compounding is going to make your next year even better.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that I mean, that thought never crossed my mind. I think we'll probably come to it later, but the idea that is this never going to be a thing, I think that's a dangerous thought. We can't start thinking that way, because at what point do you stop second guessing yourself?”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A small thing, but it makes the email addresses look incredibly natural. If you look at that and then you actually look at email addresses laid out in other fonts, those other fonts look really clunky and awkward because the A is kind of shifted around and it just looks a bit silly in my opinion. Now at Dell Samsung perfect. So we then worked with a type designer on some of the specific details that there are some of the glyphs which get a little pinsery as it were. And what we use today is very close to retail Adell Sams. This was pre launch, or this was after you'd already launched? We'd probably had.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you've used the product, you know this we fix the line length or the typographical measure to the optimal length for reading speed, which depending on the font is around 90 to 120 characters. And Adele Sans is quite narrow, so it actually lets us do this on quite small windows with a fairly dense line. So we get a lot of information on fairly small windows without getting a very long typographical measure, optimizing for reading speed and for comprehension. And then number four, finally, Adele Sans has very unusual treatment of the at symbol in an email address. It actually puts the base of the A in the at on the same baseline as the rest of the text. So for example, if your name has an A, my name does Rahul at Voras, three A's or two A's and an at, they're all actually on the same baseline.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you go through my list, number one, Adele Sands is gorgeous. I think each character is a work of art. It's beautifully formed. Number two, Adele Sands is, I would say, upbeat. It's optimistic, yet it's serious enough to convey any kind of message. It has just the right amount of personality, yet not too much personality. Number three, Adele Sands is also unusually narrow, and that actually fits email particularly well. One of my pet peeves with email, which by default uses Ariel, is that the lines are as wide as your window. So if you're in a wide screen, then the lines get really arbitrarily long. And the problem with a really wide and really long lines is that they decrease reading speed, because by the time you've reached the end of one line, your eyes have lost track of the start of the next line. And Ariel itself has fairly wide characters, which further exacerbates that. So at Superhuman,”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I discarded all the 15 because they weren't good enough. And after searching high and low, I came across a font called Adele Sans, which is designed by a foundry called Type Together with Type-Together.com. They have a whole bunch of lovely fonts. Go check them up.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percolate. And like I said, none of them was truly excellent. Number one, I was looking for a font that was in and of itself gorgeous. Number two, I was looking for a font that could also convey a message of any kind without overpowering the sentiment of that message. For example, does the font work when this is inviting you to a party? Many fonts, including almost all serif fonts, are actually too somber or too sober for that. Or to pick another extreme, does the font work if it is informing you of somebody's passing? Many fonts, sir, just too jaunty for that. You wouldn't want that kind of message in Comic Sands, for example. And number three, I was optimizing for a font that made reading speed and comprehension really fast. And then before, I was looking for a font that made email addresses themselves look great.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind The fun that we use today is a modified version of Adele Sans. And the story there is I looked at all of the major font families and honestly none of them was what I would call truly excellent. And that may sound like an odd thing to say. So let's, if you will, permit me to talk about typography and email from. So the first thing we did was we took our UI and we laid it out in about 15 different styles using examples of the major font families. We actually printed these out and we left them on a desk in the middle of our office. Sometimes we're design you want to tune in to your immediate most visceral response, but sometimes you want to truly let a design marinate. And this was the latter. So we let these designs marinate. We let these font choices.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was like, cool. I want to wire you 750k. And I said, I don't even know what I'm going to do with that money. I'm not paying myself. I won't for a while. We don't have any employees. Can't think of anything I want to spend it on. Tell you what, I'll just take 250k. It was like, what? I'm like, yeah, I'll just take 250k. We start having the conversation around venture economics. I'm like, yeah, you know, it's fine. We'll figure it out. And then a few months back, I took another 250k. And a few months back, I took another 250k as I began inventing ways and finding channels to deploy capital properly.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, I mean, quick sidebar on that, he runs Bold Stop Ventures alongside his partner, Elliot Durbin. And they have a particular interest in backing second-time founders, but they'll also back first-time founders. And they love application and infrastructure areas like superhumans. So we were like the perfect investment. He also wrote a check from his previous fund into reportive. And I think I'd made him like 5x that money. Nothing to write home about, but definitely I'm going to back this guy again, right? And so I went to him and I said, hey, listen, this is going to sound crazy. I want to take on Gmail. He said, do you have a deck? I was like, yeah, here's one slide. Here it is. And it was a screenshot of Gmail with most of it scribbled out. I want to build that. It was going to be amazing. So he said, cool, we're in, can I wire you the money? And I said, no, I don't even have a bank account yet. I come back two days later with a bank account.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a bunch of people on Twitter who are going to fight for that. But to cut the record straight, EdSim did actually write the first three checks into Superhuman.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another way to think about it is it's like a grown up co-founder. The two people I co-founded the company with, Comrade and Vivek, they've long since gone from superhuman. We're now a 10-year-old organization, and I'm one of those rare founders that is persisting and thriving actually 10 years in. That said, the journey navigates easier, it gets different, and you still need that co-founding energy around you. And I have a handful of people in the organization who are in their roles providing that kind of energy, that kind of input, and who thrive off doing so. And the president role is definitely one of them.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Act one, our email product. How far do we go down the multiplayer path? How aggressively should we lean into AI? What's a reasonable gross margin in a world with AI? Are we, from a financial perspective, okay, dipping now and then coming back later? When should we start building our second product? How do we think about our R&D strategy? Should we keep on hiring in the Bay Area? as we've done for many of our recent hires, should we continue hiring in Latin America? Should we consider other time zones as well? And so on and so on and so on. I mean, I'm just randomly coming up with questions, but the list is truly endless. It is...”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest thing was taking off the Operations and the management of the executive team and the rest of the company. So think of the president role in superhuman as an operationally extremely challenging and very growthful role. It's perfect for someone who wants to go on to be a CEO in their next role. And instead of Hiring and firing that team instead of managing and setting their goals, instead of the accountability conversations someone else is now doing that, in addition, because that's not the only job, in addition, they're also a very strong thought partner when it comes to corporate strategy, when it comes to where do we take.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, a lot. But in summary, have a coach teach you. I had many false starts myself in meditation trying the various apps, learning from books. None of it really worked for me. What worked was having one-on-one teaching from someone themselves who had been taught one-on-one, the yogic or the Raj tradition of teaching. And this person in particular had also been a venture-backed founder multiple times over. And so they're very well aware of the kinds of stresses that I tend to be under and all of his clients are mostly in technology as well. If you're in the Bay Area, this person's name is Laurent Valasek, and they run an institution called the Peak Leadership Institute. And this is all about how we can live a more integrated whole life integrating wellness practices like meditation, but for the purpose of unlocking...”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't have quite the same impact across quite as many executive functions. So there's something particularly interesting that's going on with transcendental meditation as opposed to other forms that folks are still trying to unravel and figure out.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And my EA knows they are the one who's organizing the calendar and making sure things happen when they need to happen. They also know that nothing can override this TM block. Without it, I genuinely start to fall apart. But with it, I'm able to access some very deep competencies that I didn't have before. I've been doing this now for about four or five years. And initially I simply felt happier occasionally even more euphoric coming out of a really great meditation session. But over time, I found that my ability to focus was increasing. I could hold attention on something for much longer, but I also was able to become much more creative and much more expressive. These are well-known side effects, as it were, or intended effects for some people of TM and interestingly about TM, if you compare it to other forms of meditation.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do about half an hour in the morning, including rest time. The physical rest component of it is very important to me. It's 20 minutes of the actual meditation, then 10 minutes of rest. And I do that in the morning as well as in the afternoon at around 3 p.m.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think context switches are fine. I mean, there's definitely this idea that for every interruption you have, the brain does take roughly 21 minutes on average to recover, to get back to the efficacy before that you were disturbed. And it's a big deal, of course, I'm building productivity software. We design superhuman to minimize the amount of distraction and disruption that's possible within the app. But if you're working on something and at the back of your mind something bubbles up, you have to attend to it in one way or the other. Sometimes I just write it down and I have actually, I don't have my notebook with me, but it's really big. I have like a gigantic, whatever, twice the size of A4 as I guess A3 sketchbook. And I always have a 4H pencil. So whenever one of those thoughts comes up, I just scribble it down. Or I actually stop what I'm doing and I attend to that task. Because there's a reason it's bubbling up right now.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas perhaps I should be spending 20 or 30 percent or more of my time on recruiting. But the biggest thing was I saw I was only spending 6 to 7% of my time on product on design, on technology and marketing. And these are things where I know I'm really good at them. I should either be teaching people how to do them or doing them or some combination of both. That's probably the best thing for me. It keeps me really happy very joyful. Keeps me sharp, but it's also scaling the organization. And so that's how we had that kind of an insight. Once you have this slack log, you can then graph it and chart it and see where your time is actually going.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd have to do is I'd go back to Slack, TS, colon, dealing with this other thing. And by the way, you should obviously turn up for your meetings. I'm not saying just blow through your meetings and not turn up for your one-on-ones. Definitely do those things. What I'm saying is do what feels right for as long as it feels right to do. Then at the end of the week, you can see where your time is going. And I realized at one point that I was spending only in those days.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would create certain changes. Instead of having to constantly look at the calendar and think, oh, should I stop this task, start task, I can just do what I want. If what I feel right now is, oh boy, I really need to prepare for Lenny's podcast, I'll go ahead and do that. And if I get bored or distracted eight minutes in, which sometimes happens, because something else just bubbles up to the top of my mind, well, there's a reason that my body is bubbling it up to the top of my mind. I also practice transcendental meditation, so I'm very keen on the idea of being aware and listening to what's bubbling up. And so it's okay for me to then go and attend to that thought as opposed to start to expend my focus points or my discipline or willpower on the thing that I thought I was meant to be doing.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a technique that I call the switch log, and it's borne out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. So how can we capture that? And actually, how can we create a system of work that isn't tethered to a calendar where you aren't at the behest of what some timetable says you do or you don't have to do? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted? What if every single time I changed task, I just slack DM'd my EA? But this also works in Slackbot. Like you can just has to go somewhere. I slack DM my EA and I said TS colon and then a few words for the task I was doing.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To rapidly disappear. And as a result, the organization began to slow down. Unfortunately, I was also tracking my time very closely. I had this crazy way of tracking it. And at one point, I noticed I was spending 6 to 7% of my week on these areas, these areas where I can truly be world-class at. So I had two realizations. Number one, as CEO, once you get to a certain scale and we would definitely add that scale, you can actually define what you want the role of the CEO to be at your company. And number two, the superhuman opportunity deserves everyone who works at the company to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius. And so that includes me, as well as everybody else. So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two. And the amount of time that I spend on product design, technology, and marketing went”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then there's the kind of slowdown that is avoidable. And if I remember my answer to Richie's tweet, that was the kind I was talking about. And in that case, it was our management structure. Or who does what? When we hired our initial executive teams, I followed very conventional wisdom. I ended up with a set of VPs and eight, I think, direct reports, maybe even nine. And I thought that's what you were meant to do. That's how startups are meant to scale. But as anyone who's been their knows, eight direct reports is a lot. It's a lot of hiring, it's a lot of goal setting, it's a lot of OKRs, it's a lot of accountability conversations, and fortunately also it's a lot of firing. No CEO ever gets their executive team right on the first try. So that time I had for the things that I think I can genuinely be world-class at, things like product and design and technology and marketing, that all began.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fast forward to today, and Superhuman now works wherever you do on every combination of Gmail, Outlook, Mac, Windows, Web, iOS, Android. And this actually turns out to be a really great technology moat, almost no other email app can claim this. It's taken many years of intense investment. And I think we'll touch on this later, but it's one of the main reasons why we can sell into the enterprise, because we now know everyone can use it. But this is the hard part. When you're doing that market widening, you're not solution deepening. And so your perceived product velocity may decrease. You can avoid some of these things with some smart technology decisions, but mostly you just have to grind through it. And it is worth it to get to be the other side.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing, you are going to have to need to add an iOS app and then a macOS app and then a Windows app and then an Android app and then you'll soon want to support Office 365 but that's not one thing. That's actually three things because you have to support Office 365 on desktop and then on iOS and then on Android and that's all much easier said than done. I think we at Superhuman now know things about these APIs that literally no other company knows and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some spaces, there are some markets, there are some platforms where market widening is really fast and really easy, and there are some spaces. Email is one of them, where market widening is really hard and really slow. And when we started, we had a great deal of focus. We only supported Gmail. We were only on the web. And in those early years, we could pour every ounce of R&D energy, every engineering dollar into solution deepening, making the product better for existing users. And of course, users loved it. It's how we got to product market fit. It's how most startups do. But at a certain point, almost every company then has to start investing in widening the market. For example, the market of the people who will use a new Gmail front-end, but without a mobile app does exist, but it is relatively small. And this is something that every new email startup is going to learn sooner or later. In order to keep on...”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users, but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users, but not making the product itself any better.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what we noticed was this sentiment, and we felt it first ourselves, but we also started hearing it from the market, from our users, from our customers, that we slowed down. And as a founder, as a CEO, that's the absolute last thing you want to hear. It's have a job, after all, to speed things up. And when I ask people, what do they mean by slowing down? They didn't mean the product, of course. The product wasn't working any slower, but that the pace of delivery seemed to have slowed down. I think to break this down, it's important to start by defining what we mean by a slowdown. There's the kind of slowdown that is unavoidable in certain spaces. And then there is the kind of slowdown that is quite avoidable. We actually had both. So starting with unavoidable slowdown, you can classify anything that you build in a company.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned one way of doing it, which is something that people want to share. There's actually another way, which is simply creating something remarkable, you use that word, and that is one of the core values of Superunit. So we have create delight, create something that is so joyful that it really truly brings people delight. We have deliver remarkable quality, something that is so striking, so compelling and worthy of attention that people can't but help tell others about it. And then we have build the extraordinary, which is a measure of the sort of efficacy or the innovativeness of what we want to build. So that's another trick, which is literally baking these raw ingredients for growth into your company values.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out you mentioned remarkableness. That is one of our core company values. If you think about what a company has to do, it has to grow. How do things grow? Well, let's take Elliot's advice at face value, and I believe it's true. It's creating something that people share.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the huge evolutions we've taken superhuman through over the last probably about two years. Early last year, we launched what we call superhuman 2.0. And the basic idea is we saw almost every single other app of note become collaborative by default. Figma, Notion, Loom. These are all multiplayer or collaborative by default. Yet email, the one tool that we all use more than anything else, even more than things like Slack, was still firmly stuck in its single player origins.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we've definitely found that there are whales to use the gaming terminology that one person is going to be responsible for inviting 25, 50, 100 people. And they may have various motivations for doing that in superhuman as an individual subscriber if you refer somebody else and they sign up, you both get a free month, which is a great incentive if you're paying out of pocket. So we have people who send many, many hundreds of invites and there are some people who essentially have free superhuman full life now due to how many people they've invited. But of course that incentive doesn't necessarily work inside of a company or inside of a team where ultimately it's the company paying for the product. So you have to then come up with new motivations for those people. And that's where there really isn't any substitute to having a genuinely multiplayer or a genuinely collaborative product.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, well, okay, all of these things by definition are going to peter out. There's going to be an asymptote. None of these viral mechanics keep on compounding, which actually makes sense. It would be a little absurd if things just kept on growing. What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure that isn't a mechanic, that isn't in a feature. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user about your product. And that really colored how I think about growth and virality since then. It has shaped so much of what we do at Superhuman and so much of how I think about growing brands.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, that's an amazing feature, but you have to remember not everyone is going to use it all the time. So even that feature had a lifetime viral factor of about 0.4. And that's considered good. So 0.4 is good for a viral feature. 0.6 is great. Something like 0.7 is absolutely incredible. You're in the stratosphere up with Facebook at that time.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my first one on one, I sat down with Elliot and I said, Hey, I'm here to learn, please teach me everything that you know about virality. And he said, okay, well, hate to burst your bubble, but there is no such thing as a truly viral product. I said, what do you mean? How do you explain Facebook for that matter? How do you explain LinkedIn? And he said, what I mean is no app has sustained a viral factor of greater than one for any real period of time. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about 0.7. And he told me that lasted for perhaps a year. So one person was creating about 0.7 new users. I double clicked again and I said, Well, Elliot, what about the address?”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To work with because I reported to LinkedIn's head of growth, Elliot Schmuckler, and he was responsible for scaling LinkedIn from 25 million members to when I joined north of 250 million members. And during my first one-on-one, I learned the real secret behind virality and big hint it's not about viral mechanics. And overall, that acquisition experience gave me the time to figure out what was next and the resources to truly screen for the fences.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for folks that don't know, Reportive was my last company. It was the first Gmail extension to scale to millions of users, basically on the right-hand side of Gmail, we would show you what people look like, where they work, links to their recent tweets, their LinkedIn profile, and everything else that they were doing online. So if you were hiring, marketing, selling in BD, super useful. It turns out we somehow attracted most of LinkedIn's daily active users onto this one free app, and I then ultimately ended up selling that to LinkedIn. And that by far, as you said, was the most pivotal thing I'd done in my career prior to starting Superhuman. Now, had I known that we'd amassed most of LinkedIn's active users onto one app, I would have sold it for far more. But the actual pivotal moment was really who I got.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned the real secret behind virality. There is no such thing as a truly viral product. What then is the true secret?”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a technique that I call the switch log. And it's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users. And this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do is to make something that people want. But it can't be all people. And the question becomes, how do you listen to them? And then even of what they say, what do you pay attention to and what don't you? The trick here is.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source